Making homes, vehicles, and businesses more energy efficient, with the goal of energy conservation, is seen as a largely untapped solution to addressing escalating consumer costs, energy security, global warming and overall ecological responsibility. Unfortunately, though propositions for energy efficiency first found the forefront during the 1973 oil crisis, efficiency and conservation have historically taken a secondary position to new power generation as a solution to global energy woes and the creation of national energy policy. Despite energy efficiency and conservation proving to be cost-effective strategies for building economies without necessarily growing energy consumption, the benefits of which are not lost to the high volume energy consumers such as commercial and other large facility consumers, residential consumers remain largely unaware of the potential benefits of efficientizing their energy usage; indeed, most consumers have little or no visibility into their own usage patterns, let alone the availability of alternate energy sources, rate plans and subsidies, or other government or utility sponsored programs that may reduce both cost and waste. Even the relative few with both access to and an understanding of their usage metrics, lack an intelligent method with which to utilize that data to weigh or manage the cost, quality of service, environmental impact or value added services of the available utility providers plans and programs.
Fostering consumer participation in efficient utility usage and enabling consumers to shop more intelligently for utility services requires they have easy access to a comprehensive set of easily understood and digested usage and billing data. For such a system to be most effective, it needs to examine not only gross consumption, but allow for granular visibility into usage across a users entire electrical system, additionally, it must succeed in presenting this data in a manner that provides, visibility, education and the ability to pro-actively remediate usage, both automatically and through an intuitive interface. To empower consumers, a system of this type might include services such as the presentation of real-time and historical cost and usage statistics, cost/trend analysis, the ability to propose or automatically implement optimizations to electrical usage profiles, recommend optimal electrical device/appliance/fixture retrofitment, facilitate consumers tailoring their participation in dynamic pricing options made available by utility providers, present comparative data in a standardized format (such as the Nutritional Facts standard implemented on food stuffs) allowing consumers to shop more intelligently by directly comparing cost analysis as well as quality of service and other data between utility providers, and much more. Additionally, an optimal implementation would provide a portal through which a consumer community could develop and share information and knowledge, further engaging and educating users.
Recent years has seen several products come to market in hopes of addressing some of the aforementioned consumer needs. The P3 Industries “Kill-a-Watt” and Electronic Educational Devices “WattsUp” units, for example, allow consumers to monitor the electrical energy consumption of an individual appliance, but provide no method for gathering a “total” view of the entire residence. Conversely, products such as Energy, Inc.'s “The Energy Detective”, provide the user with a “total” view of the residence, but provide no granular method for viewing the electrical energy consumption of specific appliances/loads within the residence. Still other companies have attempted to address these needs via custom, site-specific installations; such an approach requires a significant financial investment by the user in the professional installation of expensive custom hardware and dedicated computer server equipment.
Disrupting, indeed changing the current energy consumption paradigm demands a system yet unavailable to utility consumers; a system inclusive of all the aforementioned functionality, but packaged in such a way as the hardware components required are indistinguishable from the standard electrical interfaces they replaces in a typical residential or business electrical system and being a ‘plug and play’ system that requires minimal, if any, professional installation, is extensible, scalable, and inexpensive; additionally including a highly intuitive and easy to use interface to a comprehensive set of usage and cost data as well as tools to both moderate and remediate energy consumption.